What China Needs to Do to Really Put Clamps on Corruption

China’s current crackdown on corruption and official excess, comprehensive as it may seem on the outside, mirrors many failed anti-corruption campaigns from the past. It also risks reinforcing, rather than reducing, the sense among Chinese people that corruption has become pervasive — a sense reflected in the comment of one Chinese Internet user after thousands of pig carcasses were recently found floating down the Huangpu River near Shanghai: “The government is as corrupt as these dead pigs.”

The country’s new leaders are confronted with the widespread belief that corruption has worsened in recent years. That belief reflects a reality: Not only has corruption grown , but it has clearly reached the highest levels of Chinese society, where, as one newspaper put it, “the concentrations of money and power in China’s state-directed economy… have allowed numerous members of the Chinese elite and their extended families to amass extravagant fortunes.”

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The effects of the current anti-corruption campaign extend to all, including the elite and the sectors of Chinese society that fortify their elitism. This includes sellers of luxury goods, expensive caterers and high-end restaurants, where reservations have declined and waiters have lost jobs. Government officials at all levels are implicated.

And yet the campaign does not appear to be headed for any meaningful success in changing the behavior of officials high or low. A new phrase reportedly popular among government officials — “eat quietly, take gently and play secretly” — indicates that the behavior targeted by the campaign continues.

If the campaign turns out to be no more effective than previous ones, are there institutions to which the new leaders might turn in the absence of independent procurators, independent courts and a free press?

There is one conceivable option: China could construct a separate procuracy and a separatecourt specifically tasked with handling corruption cases, with members chosen by a committee of legal experts both within the procuracy and the courts and also from the world of academia.

Such independent institutions could function successfully only if they could be insulated from influence from political-legal committees (which currently can dominate judicial outcomes at all levels) or any other government or Communist Party institutions. The decisions of the new courts would have to be reviewable only by the Supreme People’s Court.

The approach suggested here could be done as an experiment, which is entirely consistent with the Chinese practice of tentatively implementing new legislation. The new institutions could be established in Beijing, in two other major cities, and also in one or two rural counties. To blunt local government influence from being exerted on police investigators, police personnel could be brought into the designated areas from other places.

This notion is not without pitfalls. In conversation with a legal official some years ago, I asked if it might be possible for Chinese legislators to consider the example of France, where administrative law cases are decided by a separate hierarchy of courts distinct from the regular judicial system. The official scoffed at this thought, exclaiming: “But then we would have two corrupt hierarchies!”

And of course nothing like the experiment suggested here is likely to be undertaken. There would be huge obstacles and resistance to implementing any new institutions that bypassed the Commission for Discipline Inspection, the Party institution that monitors (not very successfully) corrupt acts by Party members. Deep resistance to such a reform would also be expected from officials who have embraced the values and life-styles of the current era. It is a sad commentary on the Party-state that the only likely course of action that seems possible will be ineffectual poking around the edges of reform.

Looking beyond the immediate present, the danger for the new leadership of not attacking corruption in new ways — by trying to create corruption-free adjudication consistent with the rule of law, for example — is that failure might promote frustration in various sectors of Chinese society. In the long run, the new leaders risk continuing the creeping decay of governance that makes some Chinese citizens liken officials to the rotting corpses of pigs clogging the Huangpu River.

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